Robot Reading Robot Writing

December 18, 2012

Computer-Authored Books Are On Sale On Amazon: It’s one of those cliches that everyone’s got a book inside them. And that doesn’t mean you’ve just chewed your way through War and Peace, but that we all have one novel sitting inside our brains, unwritten, just waiting to hit the Kindle bestseller list. However, writing a novel is tough—all those words, all those ideas, plus you have to put it all together in a narrative unless you want to go all Joycean—but then you’ll never get rich quick.

So, why not let an algorithm do the hard work for you? They owe us anyway for letting them take over the world. This is what programmer Philip M. Parker, a professor at INSEAD, has created: an algorithmic system that takes raw data from internet searches and databases and magics it into book form using a template, so that us non-machines can digest it easier. He’s managed to create hundreds of thousands of books this way and lots of them are for sale on Amazon through his name and his company EdgeMaven Media.

Robot book scanner reads 250 pages per minute: Created by Japan’s Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, the BFS-Auto uses high speed, automated page flipping and real-time 3D page recognition to accurately scan books at a rate of over 250 pages per minute. That’s about a novel per minute, an Oxford Dictionary in under 10 minutes, or an entire 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica set in roughly two hours.